Florence Welch is ready to talk about a painful experience she had in 2023 that almost killed her before changing her life forever.
In a new The Guardian profile published over the weekend, the Florence + the Machine frontwoman revealed that she had a miscarriage two summers ago. She had gotten pregnant almost immediately after she and her boyfriend decided to try for a baby, but it ended up being an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in one of her fallopian tubes rupturing.
“The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told the publication. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
Welch ended up miscarrying shortly before she was scheduled to perform at a festival in Cornwall. Though she was in deep pain and bleeding heavily, she went through with the performance — “I took some ibuprofen and stepped out on stage,” she says — before seeing a doctor.
“I didn’t want to go for the scan,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘I’ve done this show, I’m fine, I can cope.’ But my doctor’s insistence that I come in saved my life.”
During the appointment, Welch learned of the rupture and was rushed into emergency surgery. “I had a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen,” she reflects, sharing that doctors could not save her fallopian tube.
According to the Mayo Clinic, an ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus, oftentimes growing in a fallopian tube instead. Ectopic pregnancies cannot proceed normally as there is no way for the fertilized egg to survive, and they can cause life-threatening bleeding to a mother’s body if left untreated.
Welch’s experience has since informed her upcoming album Everybody Scream, which is set to drop this Halloween. The project follows 2022’s Dance Fever, on which the musician also examined her frustrations over feeling like she must sacrifice the experience of motherhood in order to pursue her career.
Everybody Scream will also follow Welch’s collaboration with Taylor Swift, “Florida!!!,” which dropped last year as part of the pop superstar’s The Tortured Poets Department. Of performing the track with Swift on the Eras Tour, Welch said, “It was amazing.”
“I will say that, yes, I’m someone who wants to hide from the vague humiliations of fame,” she continued. “But I did step out on that stadium stage with her and I was like, ‘This is pretty f—ing cool. After this, I’m gonna have to make some changes.’”
